Sometime after I came to live with Mordecai and he adopted me as his daughter, he sat me down on our home’s rooftop and made several revelations to me. I remember that it was a spring day, a rare cool day in Susa, and a recent rainstorm had given the air a briskness and pleasant fragrance. Yet despite the milder temperature, Mordecai’s face was stiff and his voice was rough with the strain of his disclosures. He looked me in the eye only when he was through speaking.
“Hadassah,” he said, “there is a great deal I have not told you. You see, I did not seek employment at the Palace and residence in Susa merely for the pay or the prestige of the position. I also went there with the intention of discovering more about who killed our families. I believed that if I could find that out anywhere, it would be here.”
“And did you find anything?” I asked, my eagerness giving my voice a high, girlish lilt.
He nodded yes. But his eyes did not express joy.
“I found out some. I gained access to the royal archives and found, for one, that they were not Persian soldiers. There has never been an order for any unit of the Imperial army to kill Jews. However, permission had been given for a punitive raid mentioned in records against Babylon. But it was to be a politically motivated and politically targeted attack. It had no mention of focusing on civilians, let alone Jews. No, the murders were carried out by an outside mercenary force. A private squad under the protection of the Empire. I have a suspicion they may be Amalekites, for the records I saw keep mentioning a man called The Agagite, a name that refers to an ancestor of the Amalekites. This worries me greatly.”
“Who are the Amalekites?”
“Well, Hadassah,” he replied, his voice growing soft and contemplative, “you know that our people once had a homeland in a faraway place called the Promised Land, also called Israel. As a matter of fact, many of our distant relatives left here to return some years ago, when Emperor Cyrus gave his cupbearer, Nehemiah, leave to return there and rebuild our temple.”
“Yes, of course, Poppa,” I answered with a slight chuckle. “I know of this land, Israel. You speak of it all the time.”
He ignored my jibe with no more than a patient dip of his eyelids, his usual reaction, and continued. “Well, many, many years ago, when our people were still a band of wandering former slaves, we passed through the land of the Amalekites right before settling in Israel. And they were very cruel to us. In fact, without our having done anything to them, they set out to kill and torture as many of our ancestors as they possibly could.”
“Why?”
“Because they were servants of the Evil One, the spirit who hates G-d. And not only does that spirit hate G-d, but because we are His chosen people, he hates us very fiercely, too. And the Amalekites worship either him or one of his foulest spirits.”
“But, Poppa, what can you possibly do to them once you do find them, these Agagites—or Amalekites, whatever they’re called?”
He laughed. “Hadassah, you are so perceptive. The answer is, I don’t know. I only know that I have this overwhelming feeling that G-d wants me to find them.”
And in Mordecai’s recent state of mind, that settled it. Any edict attributed to G-d in our household was not to be questioned, not for a moment. I myself did not possess the maturity to distinguish His voice from the multitude of childish choruses going off in my head, but I grudgingly admired Mordecai’s unwavering certainty that he could hear it clearly. And I must admit: at this point in our lives he could lay as strong a claim to hearing G-d’s voice as anyone I could think of.
You see, Mordecai had begun to take in traveling or itinerant Jewish brothers and sisters. He still had not relented to the local high priest’s insistence that we join the temple, but their impasse had calcified into a sort of grudging respect. The cause of harmony had been helped when Mordecai had put out the word that any Jewish person seeking shelter, for reasons clandestine or otherwise, could knock seven times on our door and receive a hot dinner and a place to sleep as long as he or she needed it.
The procession of takers for our offer started slowly at first. I remember our inaugural visitor, a teacher. He immediately began a tradition of our guests sitting with Mordecai around the dinner table for hours, even on into the small hours of the morning. I think my cousin began to think of it as a nominal price of lodging for our guests to sit and pass along every piece of gossip or legitimate intelligence they could possibly remember. We learned a great deal that way. And Mordecai would never forget to eventually throw in the perennial question: Do you know anything of a band of Empire-sanctioned mercenaries riding around with this emblem and killing Jews?—and at that he would carefully unfold a cloth upon which he had traced their vile insignia, then fold it hastily before the person even had the chance to respond. I had learned only many years after my own first traumatic glimpse that Mordecai, too, had seen the broken cross on a fleeing back that horrendous night.
Mostly he heard rumors, for the legend of these killers had apparently spread far and wide, especially among Jews. Perhaps Mordecai’s own constant badgering was responsible for some of that. But these entreaties never produced much information of value.
Yet Mordecai did learn a great deal about the realm at large during his frequent visits to the Palace. After all, as the capital of a huge empire, Susa was visited by merchants, travelers and dignitaries from all over the known world. From Mordecai’s careful ears as well as the accounts of our visitors, I learned of a huge athletic contest known as the Olympian games, for instance. Local boys were gathering in the land of my empire’s enemies, Greece, to revel in the excellence of sport. I learned that Greece was ablaze with all sorts of ideas about people being equal to one another and that they explored these freedoms through elaborate stagings of these readings called theater. Of course I learned endless tidbits about the labyrinthine machinations of Persian Palace life—the jealous Princes of the King’s Face, the scheming generals, the wrathful Mothers of the King. I also learned who was impaled that week and who beheaded.
And then from our exhausted traveling visitors would come news from that place Mordecai usually called the Promised Land. A strange expression would overcome him when such things were spoken of. It was a wistful look, almost as though he were on the verge of tears. And his voice would rise and adopt a breathy, almost feminine tone.
“Tell me, have they finished rebuilding the temple?” he would ask. “Have they resumed the sacrifices? Has the Shekinah, the presence of G-d, returned to the Holy of Holies?”